Resizing Windows

User Experience Newsletter #10, October 2005

Dear User Experience Forum,

this newsletter discusses three approaches to resize computer windows on screen. Macintosh and Windows are fairly common and in everyday use. Nonetheless, there is a third way that made me utter a "Wow" – like Neo in The Matrix.

Apple uses the most consistent way to resize windows.The bottom right corner of a window contains the resizing area to drag the window to the desired new size. Easy. Simple. You can even call it 'intuitive', because the design hasn’t changed over decades. The way to display the resize box is even the most redundant way you can think of. (cf. Information Theory by Tog, 2004)

Some problems remain. How do you resize just the width or just the height of a window without screwing the other dimension? And second, how do you enlarge a window that is located at the far right part of the screen? Strange but true </personal opinion>, Windows offers a better solution. You can grab any corner and any edge of any window to change its size. A simple better design to resize windows as you like. The only drawback, you have to search and hover over the 1-pixel window border until the mouse cursor changes to start resizing.

I am dreaming of a combined design of Mac and Windows in this area.

Wow. What was that? Hope you have a Windows system to "try this at home". Go and install Michael Herf's VJPEG. It is a tiny application to display images right as you expect. No tools. Just the image without any window chrome or menus. Question is, how do you resize such a beast? Michael's solution is still astonishing to me. Just drag the image against the left or upper edge of the screen. It snaps in and you can resize the window. Wow!

Now I am dreaming of a combined design between Mac and Michael’s VJPEG for all windows.

Discussion

Srikanth Vellore

interesting!
the only drawback is perhaps that this is not all that 'intuitive'; or as late Jef Raskin would have put it, "intuitable".
also, [now, i am not sure if you meant it this way] in your writeup but it seemed to me that you were suggesting that a design is intuitive because it "hasn't changed for years". whether you did actually mean to say that or not is perhaps less important now because it spawned another an interesting point in my mind, which i wish to share in this forum.
i'd opine that, while "standardization of UI elements" can account for the 'predictability' of an Interface, it does not [automatically] suggest that the design is 'intuitable'.

a 'non-inuitable' design if repeated often enough can force the Users to learn an incorrect/ illogical way of working. many Users, quite surprisingly, do not actively question the system they use but tend to work 'with' it, even if it doesn't make sense because the more immediate objective is to get work done.
for instance, when i worked with PC's i often found it absurd that there was no standard Menu item for setting an Application's "Preferences" (some Applications would have under "Edit > Options", while some others "Tools > Options" .. ), while in the Mac, it has always been consistent - (Current Application Name) > Preferences. however, over time, i had actually learnt the wrong way of doing things on the PC and could locate with a fair amount of accuracy all the Menu items for any new application that i installed. so when i switched to the Mac, many years ago, i realized that there was a more sensible solution and that i had learnt the inelegant way of doing things merely because it was convenient 'for the time being'.

the 'Intuiability' of an interface, i would argue, has to do with the 'affordance' it provides. it is about how well the interface suggests an action (or a set of actions) to the User. or how 'obvious' it is (like the sometimes over-celebrated example of intuitability among User Interface Designers worldwide - "the door knob").
in that sense, Michael Herf's 'vJPEG' solution (of dragging the image to the top edge "against the upper edge of the screen .. ") does not seem to be a very intuitable solution albeit unusual.but yes, as Matthias Müller-Prove expressed, the dreaming shouldn't stop! makes software life so much more interesting.

Claude Toussaint

I like following definition of intuitive Interfaces: you don't need further (external) knowledge to use it.
That means you neither have to read any manuals nor to trail and error the UI nor to ask someone how to use it - your existing (internal) previous knowledge is enough.

That means that an interfaces built up with the standards the user knows is intuitive - for him! For other users who don't know this standards it won't be intuitive. With this definition there doesn't exist 'the' intuitive interface. It always depends on the individual user and his previous knowledge. An overall degree of intuitivity says only how many percent of the users have the needed previous knowledge. But an individual user could be totally overextended.

Also if we talk about self describing widgets, graphics and so on. They are only self describing if the user knows already something related to them. Without any previous knowledge there exists no intuitive interface in the digital world - never. (That's why the real world metaphors are trying to use the existing knowledge of the user.)

That means that every really new interface couldn't be really intuitive - the question is how much new things do you have to learn. What are the costs and what is the benefit? If it is only one new principle you have to learn once and the rest of the UI works konsistantly you have only a short initialisation phase - the aha-effekt which makes the software interesting. The VJPEG works like this. Nevertheless the new behaviour is hidden and you have first to know it to use it 'intuitive'.

The requirements to resize windows will change with bigger (wall-) screens and with the possibility to run more and more applications at once. Will be the combination of the Mac principle and Michael's VJPEG enough for that?

I suppose that different users will have different dreams about it - depending on their previous knowledge ;)

Srikanth Vellore

{Sorry for the delayed response, i have been travelling on work and so i couldn't keep up with this thread quickly enough}

Well, of course [i agree with Claude] that no interface can be totally 'intuitive' and work on on an entirely 'human perception' level. It would be nearly impossible to develop interfaces that require absolutely no "external knowledge", and where only native human inuition is at work. Even if such an interface were to be designed i doubt very much that it would work consistently well across cultures, geographies, biologically-related differences, educational backgrounds, varying age groups, skill levels etc..
Users are definitely required to have some prior knowledge of the design concepts/ metaphor which is being used for the interface and that's why Interface designers have to work towards reducing (if not eliminating) the gap between the User's mental model and the designer's conceptual model. All knowledge is, perhaps by definition, "external" as we are no longer dependent on direct experiences but have internalised knowledge from previously established &/ or documented sources.
So while we need not rely on the perceptive instincts of Users for everything, we can certainly do well to introduce more real-life elements where physical manipulation of interface (such as resizing) is involved.

So, at best, a successful interface probably only reflects the fact that a reasonably high percentage of the Users of that system are able to use it easily or efficiently; or that the interface is forgiving enough to allow some trial-error before it is well understood (or a combination of the two). I guess the Mac scores quite high there.

Unfortunately Mr. Herf's solution, although different and perhaps even 'forgiving', doess not seem intuitable at all because i would imagine (and i am sure i have years of User Research behind my guess) that the most obvious way for interface actions that have physical effects on the widgets would involve direct/ motor manipulation. so rather than a process of dragging the title bar towards a corner and then [having committed one 'unobvious' action] arriving again at an obvious action of dragging the frame edges, i think the more intuitable way is to simply drag the window edges!
I think it would be presumputous to think that a user would be able to guess, unless by a stroke of frustration, that the window must be dragged to a corner, where it snaps to and then it may be resized!

I guess as we move on in today's world, yesterday's knowledge becomes today's [established] practices/ customs, and where newer gadgets are not 'new' in that they cater to a direct human experience but are new in terms of the context of their redesign or the extensions of their capabilities. Therefore designing for novices becomes an increasingly difficult task since newer interfaces almost always seem to presume some pre-exisiting knowledge or experience from the User!

Have we reached a new topic by this time?
:o)
Thanks again!

Srikanth Vellore

Matthias Müller-Prove

thanks for diving into my already quoted "'intuitive'". You are absolutely right. Both of you. I just want to add a link to Raskin's article "Intuitive equals Familiar". In: Communications of the ACM 37(9) p. 17, 1994. It is available.

BTW: There is another aspect of VJPEG that makes it very 'efficient'. The area where you can start the resizing operation is fairly large. It is 100% of the window. Grab is anywhere(!) (... and move it against the edges of the screen).

The whole window as a hot area for dragging! Who wants to perform the math with Fitts' Law?